Latest news with #Lapham'sQuarterly
Winnipeg Free Press
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Language in literary fiction debut masterfully mines love's complexities
Tarisai Ngangura gained prominence as a music journalist and photographer writing about Black experience in the context of global histories, collective memory and political movements. Her reporting has appeared in Vanity Fair, Lapham's Quarterly and Rolling Stone, among other publications. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Ngangura completed her post-secondary journalism education at Toronto Metropolitan University. She divides her time between Toronto and Manhattan and has worked in Brazil, the United States and Canada. The Ones We Loved is Ngangura's literary fiction debut, a novel set in a rural landscape — a composite of towns in Zimbabwe and Brazil, according to the author — that depicts a love story between unnamed He and She who meet on a bus, each on the run from a devastating event from which there is no return. Hanah + Vinnie photo Tarisai Ngangura Back stories emerge as the novel shifts from past to present, and readers come to know the town of Waterfall, She's mother, She's two best friends Joy and Kuda as well as Kuda's mercurial and mysterious grandmother. Then there is the town of Spilling River and He's two best friends and chosen family, Kind Eyes and Blink and Miss. The long-ago loss of He's parents is an absence that permeates his psyche in shifting ways over time. 'As he got older, the memories grew dimmer and the stories larger, until they became what was told to him around a fire and before bed when the mind was open and accepting, and in times of quiet when memories fill the spaces where life has slowed,' Ngangura writes. The fields of Waterfall and Spilling River grow sorghum, maize, pumpkins and water-hungry sugarcane. The farmers, writes Ngangura, 'moved heavy, like their bodies weighed more than skin and nails and tears and blood and sweat and hair.' There are the landowners and their workers, and that sharp divide pierces the past, present and future of the novel's inhabitants. Colonial violence, survival, memory, fleeting joys and lasting grief inform every utterance and silence. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. This interplay between reported silence and speech is mesmerizing, instructive and often channelled through the elders: Mr. and Mrs. Clay, who lost their children but held onto love; Kuda's grandmother, who disappears repeatedly with no explanation upon return; and Gogo J., who refuses to marry because 'she needed honesty instead of smooth retellings.' A great achievement of the novel is the conveyance of a sensibility and epistemology that differs from the confines of the English language in which it is written. Ngangura's mother tongue is Shona, a Zimbabwean language characterized by oral storytelling, and its rhythms, cadences and repetitions seep into the novel's written English to create space for intergenerational wisdom, memory and grief. Another highlight, if one can call anything concerning a violent truth a highlight, is the skill with which Ngangura reveals the two shattering incidents from which She and He respectively are escaping. The novel is a true masterclass in trauma-informed storytelling and the art of literary fiction. Ngangura has spoken with admiration of Noor Naga's debut, If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English, calling it innovative and revelatory. The Ones We Loved attains a similar feat, an assured first novel that breaks ground by enriching the English language with other ways of knowing in order to tell a love story in all of its necessary complexity. Sara Harms is a Winnipeg editor.
New York Times
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Lapham's Quarterly Reaches Deal to Live On
When Lewis Lapham died last year, it appeared that his magazine might go with him. Lapham's Quarterly, a beloved journal of history and reportage he started, had stopped putting out issues. The fate of the publication was uncertain without Mr. Lapham, a nattily dressed former editor at Harper's who seemed to personify a bygone era of magazines. But Mr. Lapham's magazine will live on, though under a much different owner. Bard College, a private liberal arts institution in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., is acquiring it at no cost from the American Agora Foundation, the nonprofit that had published the magazine. 'This will benefit all our students,' said Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College. 'To understand how it's possible to talk intelligently, without jargon, without the worst of self-referential academic prose, about important ideas and important controversies and complexities, which we seem not to tolerate today.' Lapham's Quarterly, which was founded in 2007, is something of an oddity, even for the quirky magazine business. Each issue connects a broad, sweeping theme — 'Night,' for example, or 'Happiness' — to current events thorough long-form articles and excerpts from historical texts by writers like Shakespeare. Mr. Lapham had already written the preamble to the latest issue, focused on energy, when he died in July at age 89. Bard College plans to publish that issue in print and has others in development, with the titles 'Islands' and 'Folly.' It's still unclear whether Bard will continue Lapham's Quarterly on its regular print schedule after that. The magazine will be operated by the Hannah Arendt Center, a politics and humanities institution founded by the scholar Roger Berkowitz. One of the most valuable assets owned by the foundation, the list of 17,500 paying subscribers to Lapham's Quarterly, will also pass to Bard, said Paul Morris, the magazine's publisher and executive editor. It is unclear whether any of the 18 or so staff members furloughed when the magazine went on hiatus last year will be hired back. The American Agora Foundation will dissolve. Before he died, Mr. Lapham blessed the transaction with Bard on a call with Mr. Morris. But it took months for Bard to vet copyright issues, said Mr. Morris, who added that his only regret was that Mr. Lapham wasn't around to see the magazine pass into safe hands. 'It's my great lament that he couldn't be here for this conversation,' Mr. Morris said, 'because I know he'd be echoing everything that's been said and adding his own flavor to it.'
